There is often a need to have scheduled maintenance tasks run on the free ESXi edition which unfortunately has some crippled features. An example of this is when implementing the fine ghettoVCB backup scripts. As this is an often needed feature I thought I’d document the process in this article. Having enabled ssh access to your ESXi server, ssh in as root. Firstly, add the cron job to the root crontab:

The arcticle is a reference table listing VMware ESXi version, release date and build numbers.